Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Marin is getting more memories

These Ethiopian songs we play lately seem to be helping Marin to recall her African childhood.

Today she was looking at our adoption trip photo album and she started asking some tough questions.
- "Why you come get me?"
- "How you knowed about me?"
- "How you knowed Emmy my sister?"
- " Who telled you these things?"
- "Why you take me and not someone else, like Lidet or Rowina?"

The she started talking about her birth parents, she calls "my other Mommy" and "my other Daddy". And where she was raised "my other house".

She told us that her other Mommy died. We asked how. Meron said "She sick, then die. No more talk about it."

Then we asked about her father and how he died. Meron said "Other man, big man, smack my Daddy on head, hard, like this (she demonstrates), then died" I asked Meron "You saw this?" She said "Yes, I seed it myself. No more talk about it." We pressed Meron a little, but she was getting visibly upset so we let it go.

Colleen and I looked at each other like "Holy Crap! We never imagined anything like this!"

The official story from Ethiopia was they did not know how the father died. So we've been telling people who asked that he died from Tuberculosis (a common killer in the area) because we found that Americans cannot accept that we would not know how the father died. Americans usually don't get it that most of Ethiopia is illiterate and records are poorly kept.

So now we wonder whether Meron witnessed her Father's murder. And could that explain why she is so affection to females, boys, and young men, but actively resists contact with older and large men (my father for example). Emmy does not resist at all.

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